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COPYRIGHT DEPOSfR 



Ci^e free JLife 



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Copyright, 1908, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 
Published September, 1908 



IlISRARY of CONGRESS 
1 wo GODies Hecaiv<)fi 

AUG. 5 J 1908 
cj>PY a. 

* 1 1 *»»mrmi>itmmm0mm 






D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston 



Cl)e ifree JLtfe 



"And be not conformed to this world : but be ye trans- 
formed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove 
what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of 
God." Rom. 2cii: 2. 

€T^ |*HE college graduate almost 
\^_JL always thinks of himself as 
just about to begin life. There is a 
great deal that is false and merely- 
conventional in the thought. He has 
been in the midst of life twenty 
years and more, and every year has 
added to the intimacy and the va- 
riety of his contact with the per- 
sons and the circumstances that lay 
about him. Particularly after he en- 
tered college he must have been 
aware that earlier trammels and 
safeguards had fallen away and that 
he was put upon his mettle as a man 
to win a place and make a career. 
What happens to him at graduation 
is no sudden or violent thing. The 



Ci^e free Uft 



scene will only slowly widen about 
him as hitherto. 
Of course it is true in respect of 
most young men that the paths they 
have trod in their years of tutelage 
have been sheltered and private ways 
such as thoughtful love has pre- 
pared, generation after generation, 
for the feet of the boys who are to 
be nurtured and trained for the work 
of their years of independence and 
maturity. I pity the man who cannot 
look back to those delicious seques- 
tered places from which we first 
saw the world, that dear covert made 
by mothers' and fathers' love and 
kept inviolable by all the gentle arts 
of guardian care. What free spaces 
there were for play and all light- 
hearted sport! How generously long 
those golden days seemed, and with 
what gracious figures they were 
filled, of knights and fairies and he- 
roes who seemed our very com- 
rades! How slowly the years moved, 



Ci^e free life 



and how good it was that they were 
long and full of dreams ! 

The years presently quickened their 
pace, you remember, and when we 
became schoolboys the world grew 
more definite about us: there were 
fewer dreams and more realities. 
But the paths were still sheltered 
and delightful. There was no anxious 
shifting for ourselves: the plan of 
our days was made for us. They were 
still free days, made for sport and 
pleasure. School hours and study 
only gave zest to play and to all the 
unchartered liberties of the mind. 
We did not come upon short days 
and engrossing tasks and the feeling 
that work was the veritable master 
in all things until we got to college ; 
and even there we kept, perhaps 
kept too long, the spirit of boys, and 
made the work as much as might be 
an incident still, and not an occupa- 
tion. 

In a very real sense, therefore, you 

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are at the threshold of the life which 
is to mean constant and independ- 
ent endeavor, the actual making of 
the careers you have been looking 
forward to ; and this is the day, the 
very sacred day of special counsel, 
when we ask ourselves what chart 
and mode of life we have found by 
which to determine and make safe 
our course of life henceforth, by 
which to make sure of hope and 
courage to sustain us as we break 
up these dear comradeships, leave a 
little world that has known us, and 
severally seek places for ourselves 
among strangers. The text of Scrip- 
ture that has seemed to come most 
directly to meet my thought as I 
pondered this turning-point in your 
life is that which is contained in cer- 
tain words to be found in the second 
verse of the twelfth chapter of Ro- 
mans: '*Be not conformed to this 
world : but be ye transformed by the 
renewing of your mind, that ye may 
4 



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prove what is that good, and accept- 
able, and perfect, will of God." 

It may seem strange and futile 
counsel to give to a company of 
young men who are about to go out 
into the world to ask a living of it — 
a chance to serve it, to partake of its 
life and of its rewards — to tell them 
that they must not conform to what 
they find, must not accept the rules 
of the life they enter as novices, 
by permission and not by right, 
which they enter as those who would 
learn and not as those who would 
teach. Their advice will neither be 
asked nor accepted, and they will be 
laughed at for their pains if they offer 
it. But the counsel of the words I have 
quoted is no counsel of presumption. 
It is a mere counsel of integrity. The 
"world" is no fixed thing or order 
of life that stands unchanged from 
generation to generation, or even 
from day to day. Its habit and prac- 
tice change with every generation 

5 



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that rules it, and your generation is 
to come, one of these days, upon its 
years of rule. Have you anything in 
your hearts which will distinguish 
you from the common run of men 
who lose themselves in the mass and 
never emerge again carrying any 
light of their own? 
"Be not conformed to this world," 
— this world that is always chan- 
ging, that is never sure that it sees 
any fixed points or stands upon any 
lasting foundation. You have been 
given an opportunity to get the off- 
ing and perspective of books, of the 
truths which are of no age, but run 
unbroken and unaltered throughout 
the changeful life of all ages. You 
know the long measurements, the 
high laws, by which the world's pro- 
gress has ever been gauged and as- 
sessed, — laws of sound thinkingand 
pure motive which seem to lie apart 
in calm regions which passion can- 
not disturb, into whose pure air wan- 
6 



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der no mists or confusions or threats 
of storm. Amidst every altered as- 
pect of time and circumstance the hu- 
man heart has remained unchanged. 
No doubt there were simpler ages, 
when the things which now per- 
plex us in hope and conduct seemed 
very plain. If life confuses us now, 
no doubt it is because we do not see 
it simply and see it whole. Look back 
more often and you shall find your 
vision adjusted for the look ahead. 
Reflections like these seem to me 
to spring naturally to the thought 
out of the words of Scripture coun- 
sel I have read. "Be not conformed 
to this world : but be ye transformed 
by the renewing of your mind," — by 
that simplification of motive and of 
standard which is a return to a sort 
of youth and naturalness of thought 
drawn out of those only fountains 
of perpetual youth, the fountains of 
just thought and true feeling. At 
them, and only at them, do you get 

7 



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a veritable and constant renewal of 
your minds: the refreshment which 
brings back the taste for all things 
sweet and primitive in their truth. 
These fountains have always lain 
about you, — when you were children, 
when you were gro wingyouths, since 
you became men with open eyes, 
here in college. 

Some of them are the fountains of 
learning, which have here been so 
accessible to you. If their waters 
have not tasted pure and sweet to 
you, with a tang of the wholesome 
earth that renews all things, it is 
because you have drunk of them 
neither often enough nor copiously 
enough to wash the dust of the com- 
mon road from your palates. Learn- 
ing is knowledge purged of all that 
is untested and ephemeral. It is nei- 
ther the rumour of the street nor the 
talk of the shop nor the conjecture 
of the salon. It has been purified and 
sifted in quiet rooms to which pass- 
8 



Ci^e IFree Life 



ing fashions of thought do not pene- 
trate. It has passed through mind 
after mind Hke water through the 
untainted depths of the earth, and 
springs to the places of its revela- 
tion, not a thing of the surface, but a 
thing from within where the sources 
of thought lie. Men come and go, 
but these things abide, like the face 
of the heavens. Age is linked with 
age by the permanence of the phy- 
sical universe and the unchanging 
nature of the human spirit. Hearts 
are ever the same, whatever the set- 
ting of the stage or the plot of the 
play. 

And so the fountains of learning 
become the fountains of perpetual 
youth. At them are our minds re- 
newed; at them do we drink of the 
pure waters undefiled whose sources 
lie below all circumstance, all ac- 
cident, all surface temperature or 
season. Afterwe have tasted of them 
much of the talk of the day seems 

9 



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like the mere lees of cheap wine, 
of the vintage of yesterday. We are 
renewed by learning in the sense 
that our minds are, as it were, 
brought back to the originals and 
first bases of thought, to direct com- 
munion with all that is primitive and 
permanent and beyond analysis or 
conjecture: as our manners are re- 
newed — that is, simplified — when 
social convention and all mere 
fashion falls away in the presence 
of danger, of sincere, unselfish love, 
and of all pure passion; as our lungs 
are renewed by the pure, untainted 
air of free uplands or by the keen 
breath of the wind that comes out 
of the hills. Learning has come into 
the world, not merely to clear men's 
eyes and give them mastery over 
nature and human circumstance, 
but also to keep them young, never 
staled, always new, like the stars and 
the hills and the sea and the vagrant 
winds, which make nothing of times 

10 



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or occasions, but live always in se- 
rene freedom from any touch of de- 
cay, the sources of their being some 
high law which we cannot disturb. 
But the fountains of learning are 
not the only fountains of perpetual 
youth and renewal. There are other 
springs of the spirit which, like the 
springs of learning, renew us from 
age to age in all our spiritual quali- 
ties, which hold us to the originals 
of all that is fresh and enjoyable 
in the life from which we draw our 
strength. There are the fountains 
of friendship, copious, free, inex- 
haustible, confined to no time or 
region or season. Do we not know 
them? Do they not abound in this 
place? Whether we have resorted 
to the fountains of learning or not, 
though we may have neglected them 
in our folly, we have known the re- 
freshment of these other sources of 
renewal, these sweet fountains of 
friendship, — have drunk of them al- 
ii 



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most to intoxication here in this 
place of comradeships. I hope that 
we have drunk of them with com- 
prehending hearts, perceiving the 
true and excellent quality of the 
sweet waters we quaffed. If pure 
and taken with pure lips, they will 
have given us taste of unselfishness 
and self-sacrifice. That is not true 
friendship which proceeds merely 
from the action of a self-pleasing 
taste, which is nothing more than 
a self-indulgent pleasure It is very 
delightful to consort with compan- 
ions who gratify our zest for good 
fellowship, amuse us with gay talk 
and entertaining jest, walk our own 
familiar ways of thought and feeling, 
welcome our coming and never bore 
us; who, if dull, are dull to our liking, 
of the quality of dullness that rests 
and reassures us. But friendship is 
a much larger, much finer, much 
deeper thing, than this mere relish 
of good company. It is a great deal 

12 



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more than mere congenial compan- 
ionship. Let true and deep affection 
once grip you ; let interest and plea- 
sure once deepen into insight and 
sympathy and a sense of vital kin- 
ship of mind and spirit, and the re- 
lationship takes on an energy and 
a poignancy you had not dreamed 
of in your easy search for pleasure. 
Spirit leaps to spirit with a new 
understanding, a new eagerness, a 
new desire : and then you may make 
proof whether it be true friendship 
or not by the quick and certain test 
whether you love yourself or your 
friend more at any moment of di- 
vided interest. 
TYue friendship is of a royal line- 
a^e.T t IS of the sanie kith and breetf^ 
ing as loyalty and self-forgetting de- 
votion, and proceeds upon a higher 
principle even than they. For loyalty 
may be blind, and friendship must 
not be ; devotion may sacrifice prin- 
ciples of right choice which friend- 

13 



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ship must guard with an excellent 
and watchful care. You must act 
in your friend's interest whether it 
please him or not: the object of love 
is to serve, not to win. It is a hard 
saying, I know; — who shall be pure 
enough to receive it? There is but ^ 
one presence in which it can be 
made plain and acceptable, and that 
is the presence of Christ, where it . 
may stand revealed in the light of/ 
that example which makes all duty -^ 
to shine with the face of privilege 
and of exalted joy. -* 

Here are the fountains of real re- 
newairFsuppose Oiat wecan speak / 
of our minds as indeed renewed 
when they are carried back in vivid I 
consciousness to some first and pri- 
mal standard of thought and duty ; 
to images which seem to issue di- 
rect from the God and Father of our 
spirits, fresh with immediate crea- 
tion, clear as if they had the light of 
the first morning upon them, —as 
14 



Ci^e iJFree Life 



those who go back to the very 
springs of being. It is thus of neces- 
sity that our renewal comes through 
love, through pure motive, through 
intimate contact with whatever re- 
minds us of what is permanent and 
forever real, whether we taste it in 
the fountains of learning, of friend- 
ship, or of divine example, the crown 
alike of friendship and of trutho 
To one deep fountain of revelation 
and renewal few of you, I take it for 
granted, have had access yet, — I 
mean the fountain of sorrow, a foun- 
tain sweet or bitter according as it 
is drunk in submission or in rebel- 
lion, in love or in resentment and 
deep dismay. I will not tell you of 
these waters ; if you have not tasted 
them, it would be futile, — and some 
of you will understand without word 
of mine. I can only beg that when 
they are put to your lips, as they 
must be, you will drink of them as 
those who seek renewal and know 

15 



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how to make of sadness a mood of 
enlightenment and of hope. 

You will see that I but go about to 
elucidate a single theme: that all 
individual human life is a struggle, 
when rightly understood and con- 
ducted, against yielding in weak 
accommodation to the changeful, 
temporary, ephemeral things about 
us, in order that we may catch that 
permanent, authentic tone of life 
which is the voice of the Spirit of 
God,— 

"A presence that disturbs us with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting 

suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all 

thought. 
And rolls through all things." 

It is not a thing remote, obscure, 
poetical, but a very real thing, that 
i6 



Ci^e jftee Itfe 



lives in the consciousness of every- 
one of us. Every thoughtful man, 
every man not merely of vagrant 
mind, has been aware, not once, but 
many times, of some unconquerable 
spirit that he calls himself, which 
is struggling against being over- 
borne by circumstance, against be- 
ing forced into conformity with 
things his heart is not in, things 
which seem to deaden him and de- 
prive him of his natural independ- 
ence and integrity, so that his indi- 
viduality is lost and merged in some 
common, undistinguishable mass, 
the nameless multitudes of a world 
that ceaselessly shifts and alters 
and is never twice the same. He 
feels instinctively that the only vic- 
tory lies in nonconformity. He must 
adjust himself to these things that 
come and go and have no base or 
principle, but he must not be sub- 
dued by them or lose his own clear 
lines of chosen action. 

17 



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The college man, particularly if, 
while he studied, he has lived as we 
live here, where the world is repro- 
duced in small, with its comrade- 
ships and rivalries and organiza- 
tions, its social compulsions and its 
voluntary efforts of individuals and 
of societies, is entitled to think that 
he can distinguish the permanent 
from the ephemeral, determine what 
he will ignore, what accept. He 
should have learned that noncon- 
formity is not antagonism; that he 
is not undertaking the impossible 
and ridiculous task of rebuking and 
reconstructing a world established 
and independent of him ; that what 
he is attempting is what I may term 
an influential nonconformity, which 
adds a new item of force to the world, 
— adds a man who thinks for him- 
self, a man renewed by fresh contact 
with the sources and originals of 
thought and inspiration, and ready 
to give the world just that occa- 
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Ci^e free life 



sional thrill of reminder which keeps 
the breath of progress and of re- 
newal in its nostrils. The world 
always responds to the impulse 
when it finds an authentic man, 
whom it cannot crush or ignore, who 
speaks always words of his own, and 
yet who flings no foolish defiance to 
his generation, is ready for all gen- 
erous cooperation, is an eager ser- 
vant of his day and time, not its 
opponent or critic of destruction, — 
just a self-respecting, thoughtful, 
unconquerable human spirit. 

"Be not conformed to this world: but 
be ye transformed by the renewing 
of your mind." This transformation 
is no apotheosis, it is no changing of 
men into angels, no transmutation 
of common flesh into stuff of immor- 
tality. It is a transformation effect- 
ed by the renewing of your minds, 
a transformation of attitude and 
motive, of purpose, of point of view. 
It is the transformation effected in 

19 



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i 



the spirit itself by seeing the world 
as a work of God, in its largeness 
and entirety, contained in no single 
generation, lasting, a thing of spirit, 
from age to age, from friendship to 
friendship, from love to love; knit 
together of human beings, spirits 
great and small, inspired and paltry, 
lifted or debased by victory or defeat 
in a continual struggle to see and 
receive the truth; a mode of ener- 
gy serene, augmenting, persistent. 
Every great thought and principle 
works its transformation upon the 
spirits of those who receive it, and a 
mind renewed is a mind transformed. 
The university has been a place of 
transformation for you, whether you 
willed it to be or not : the question is 
only in how great a degree you have 
been transformed. You are not what 
you were when you came here : you 
cannot have escaped some wider 
view of men and of truth and of cir- 
cumstance and of nature than you 

20 



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had when you came here unformed 
boys ; and for some of you the trans- 
formation has been complete. You 
neither think nor purpose as you did 
before the processes of our teaching 
and our Hfe wrought upon you ; and 
now you are about to have occasion 
to show how vital the process has 
been. 

The transformed university man, 
whose thought and will have been 
in fact renewed out of the sources 
of knowledge and of love, is one 
of the great dynamic forces of the 
world. We live in an age disturbed, 
confused, bewildered, afraid of its 
own forces, in search not merely of 
its road, but even of its direction. 
There are many voices of counsel, 
but few voices of vision; there is 
much excitement and feverish activ- 
ity, but little concert of thoughtful 
purpose. We are distressed by our 
own ungoverned, undirected ener- 
gies and do many things, but no- 

21 



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thing long. It is our duty to find our- 
selves. It is our privilege to be calm 
and know that the truth has not 
changed, that old wisdom is more 
to be desired than any new nostrum, 
that we must neither run with the 
crowd nor deride it, but seek sober 
counsel for it and for ourselves. 
Our true wisdom is in our ideals. 
Practical judgments shift from age 
to age, but principles abide; and 
more stable even than principles are 
the motives which simplify and en- 
noble life. That, I suppose, is why 
the image of Christ has grown, not 
less, but more distinct in the con- 
sciousness of the race since the tra- 
gic day in which He died upon the 
cross. How unlike in every external 
circumstance was that day to our 
own; how the world has changed 
and shifted in every institution and 
every circumstance since the day 
when all men were provincials of 
Rome; and yet there has been no 

22 



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age to which Christ did not seem to 
belong as truly and intimately as 
he belonged to the world in which 
Palestine was property of imperial 
Rome, and Joseph and Mary ob- 
scure subjects of the Caesar. He is 
the only permanent person of his- 
tory, the only being who was of no 
age because he was of all, the only 
complete and unalterable epitome 
of what man is and what man would 
be, a creature of two worlds, the 
world that changes and the world 
that changes not, — the world where 
spirit but struggles for recognition, 
and the world in which spirit is re- 
leased to know its own freedom and 
perfection. How the task of renewal 
and transformation is simplified for 
us by his person and example, so 
clear to our vision, so easy to be un- 
derstood, so dear to every right in- 
stinct in us, — our divine kinsman, to 
whom our spirits yearn whenever 
stirred by pain or hope! 

23 



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And if Christ is adjusted to all ages, 
he is conformed to none: He is the 
only true citizen of the world. There 
is in him constant renewal, the fresh, 
undying quality that draws always 
direct from the sources of know- 
ledge and of conduct. He interprets 
— only He can perfectly interpret — 
our text. His is the nonconformity 
of the perfect individual, unsophis- 
ticated, unstaled, unsubdued. His is 
the perfect learning distilled into 
wisdom, the perfect friendship lifted 
to the utter heights of self-sacrifice, 
the perfect sorrow steeped in hope, 
which keep his mind and spirit naif, 
spontaneous, creative, the cause, 
not the result, of circumstance. Not 
all the hoarded counsel of the world 
is worth the example of a single per- 
son: it is abstract, intangible until 
incarnated; and here, incarnate, is 
the man Christ who in his own life 
and person shows us and all the 
world "what is that good, and ac- 
24 



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ceptable, and perfect, will of God" 
which would have us see in the face 
of all knowledge, of all love, of all 
experience, the long lines of light 
which illuminate the meaning of our 
lives, — lines that blaze unbroken 
out of the elder ages that have gone 
and sweep past us into the mysteri- 
ous days whither we go, from which, 
one by one, we draw the veil away. 
In an ancient place of learning we 
stand where generations meet and 
merge, where ages render their 
common reckoning; and the teach- 
ing of a university with regard to 
the long processes of human life 
should be the same as the Master's: 
that every soul that is truly to live 
must be born again, must come fresh 
into its own age with the spirit of 
immortality — which is the spirit of 
eternal youth — upon it, the bright- 
ness of another morning of creation 
about it, the dayspring from on high. 
"Be not conformed to this world: 

25 



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but be ye transformed by the renew- 
ing of your mind: that ye may prove 
what is that good, and acceptable, 
and perfect, will of God" which is 
without date or age or end and which 
gives to every one of us a like im- 
mortal youth and liberty and power. 

I have tried to give you in these 
parting words, on this solemn day, 
some glimpse of spiritual things. I 
hope the words have not been too 
mystical, too remote from the voca- 
bulary of what we ordinarily think 
and say. We have gone a happy 
journey of four years together. Our 
comradeship has not depended up- 
on an actual personal acquaintance 
with one another. Nothing happens 
here that does not happen to all of us: 
there is no current of our lives which 
we do not all feel. We have had much 
counsel together. Though you hand 
your function of counsel on to-day to 
those who are to succeed you, you 
26 



Cl^e ifree Life 



must know that you will leave much 
behind you that is your permanent 
contribution of love to the growth 
and wholesomeness of the place. ^ 
And you can never be spiritually 
severed from your Alma Mater. 
Some part of her will always live in 
you. 

And it is just that fact which I wish 
might be interpreted to you and, 
through you, to all the world. This 
place is but a material image that 
changes from age to age: the real 
university is a spirit which goes with 
you, as it stays with us, — the spirit 
of learning, which is always young 
and which does not conform to this 
world ; the spirit of friendship, which 
unlocks the secret of loyalty and of 
self-sacrifice ; the spirit which seeks 
intimate contact with the springs of 
motive, and which lifts us into the 
presence of Christ. 

It is a solemn thing to look one 
another for the last time in the eyes, 

27 



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to grasp hands and say farewell; but 
we do not in fact break company if 
we have indeed been linked in spirit. 
Be brave; walk with open and 
uplifted eyes; let neither hardship 
nor sorrow touch you with dismay. 
Nothing but our own weakness can 
taint the integrity of manly candour 
and simple uprightness. God send 
you stout hearts in all weather. Our 
love and our faith shall follow you. 
We pledge you with all good cheer 
for the long journey, and pray God 
we shall all meet at home at its end. 



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